What IS CCS Classification!!

Clinical Classifications Software (CCS) is a tool for clustering patient diagnoses and procedures into a manageable number of clinically meaningful categories. This was developed by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

CCS is used to analyze costs, usage, and outcomes associated with patient diagnoses and procedures.

CCS is composed of diagnoses and procedures categories, which are organized in two related classification systems. The single-level system consists of 285 mutually-exclusive diagnosis categories, 231 mutually-exclusive procedure categories, and no hierarchical structure. The multi-level system uses the single-level categories and International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) codes in a hierarchical system consisting of four levels for diagnoses and three levels for procedures. This "clinical grouper" makes it easier to quickly understand patterns of diagnoses and procedures so that health plans, policy makers, and researchers can analyze costs, utilization, and outcomes associated with particular illnesses and procedures.

How Often id Updates?
CCS is updated annually.

How Is CCS Used?

Clinical Classifications Software can be used with all clinical data that are coded using ICD-9-CM codes. CCS is used in a variety of ways:

Managed care plans utilize CCS to rank hospitalizations by type of condition. One managed care plan used CCS to examine numbers of cases, length of stay, and total costs, to better understand which conditions and procedures were associated with the highest resource use.
Insurers use CCS to develop clinically-based utilization profiles. For example, one insurer integrated CCS into in-house software that develops profiles of patient populations and purchasers.
Researchers use CCS to explore the types of conditions and procedures that are most frequent in their study populations or to compare alternative treatments for similar conditions. In one study of differences in use of procedures among payers, CCS procedure categories provided a convenient grouping scheme.
Researchers also use CCS in risk adjustment models and as a way to predict future health resource utilization. Investigators in one study found that categorizing patients using CCS predicted more than 40 percent of the subsequent year's medical expenses.